On the paper roll that serves as a guest book at the Phoenix in Waterbury, one visitor wrote, “Nice gallery! So trusting!” Indeed, visiting an exhibition in the high-ceilinged room can be a solitary, freeing experience of seeing art. Founding director and head curator Joseph Pensak monitors the gallery through cameras while perched in his most recent enterprise, TREEHOUSE — an upstairs store, coworking space and small-business enclave across Main Street.
TREEHOUSE also serves as an overflow exhibition space for the current show at the Phoenix, “Primordial Forms: Cynthia Kirkwood, Terry Ekasala, Grace DeGennaro.” A welcome alternative to the practice of putting extra pieces in storage, the arrangement allows visitors to see the artists in a different context and alongside others whose work Pensak sells.
Kirkwood, Ekasala and DeGennaro — of Montpelier, East Burke and Yarmouth, Maine, respectively — are all established artists. The show’s guest curator, Kirkwood, brought in DeGennaro. Pensak added Ekasala to the mix, he said during a recent visit, and wrote the curatorial essay. The former Presbyterian minister unites the trio’s work under the biblical rubric of “the language of origins” and, without explicitly mentioning childbirth, names “feminine power” as the ancient origin of creativity.
In truth, these abstract artists’ works gain interest simply from juxtaposition. Kirkwood and DeGennaro are fully invested in symmetry, the province of meditation and mandalas. Each of their works invokes calmness through flat geometric shapes centered on uncluttered canvases (Kirkwood) or concentrically placed in a square format (DeGennaro). Ekasala’s work, by contrast, has a disruptive energy and gestures toward representation. Her organic forms are devoid of footing of any kind — let alone centering — and roil with emotion.
Among Kirkwood’s exploratory concerns in her works, which date from 2022 to 2025, is color. “Horizontal Mystery Signal: Unseen” (30 by 48 inches) has a richly layered and reworked maroon background. The named colors of “Two Seeds: Lilac and Chartreuse” (30 by 24 inches) are slightly haloed on their pink background; the painting is one of two that use marble dust, which adds a nubbly texture to the paint.
A Middlebury College fine arts graduate, Kirkwood has lived and exhibited around the world but grew up in Bermuda from the age of 3. One imagines that those formative years among the island’s pink-sand beaches still impact her use of color.
According to her artist bio, forms and compositions come to Kirkwood intuitively and, “rather than depicting something, they are objects in themselves — mysterious seeds, doorways, keys, offerings — channeling beneficial energy.” In that light, the vertical violet bar cupped by two coral-pink half circles against a sky-blue background in “Signal: Great Sound” has a different presence from a similar composition in pale yellow, chartreuse and pink in “Linden,” named for a tree. Titles are key.
Kirkwood also contributed a set of six ink-and-watercolor works on 11.25-by-7.5-inch paper from her series “Mystery Semaphore.” Each seems to signal something different with its central column of abstract line drawings bordered by daubs of color. That so many of her titles include the word “mystery” or “signal” indicates the extent to which Kirkwood follows a subconscious directive while creating. As she said in a 2005 interview with Bermuda’s Royal Gazette, “If you know what you’re doing and it’s easy, it’s not creative.”
While Kirkwood’s forms have dreamily blurred edges, DeGennaro creates precise, almost mathematical constructions. Her juxtaposition of color and her concentric constructions on square 16- or 34-inch canvases bring to mind Josef Albers’ “Homage to the Square” series. In fact, DeGennaro has announced that she is doing a fall residency at the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut.
The Maine artist, however, cited different inspirations in a recent interview with Decor Maine: specifically, two architectural plans of religious structures from 16th-century Rome: Donato Bramante’s Tempietto and Michelangelo’s unrealized San Giovanni dei Fiorentini. Both consist of a circle within a square.
“Circles symbolize the cosmos, and squares delineate the spatial directions of our physical world,” she said in the Decor Maine interview. DeGennaro’s subject is nothing less than the universe and humans’ attempts to grasp it through archetypal forms, symbolism and sacred geometry.
Among her works at the Phoenix, which date from this year and last, is “Bright Faith,” in oil and cold wax on linen. The composition is like a Russian doll of circles and squares: a small, central blue circle inside a yellow square contained in a light blue circle that rests on a bright red square canvas. Atop all is a hexagonal grid of lines created with alternating black and white dots. The grid intersects with each of the layered shapes at precise points, and the dots evoke beads, suggesting a meditative state.
From DeGennaro’s controlled geometric minimalism to Ekasala’s improvisational paintings is such a leap that, thankfully, Ekasala receives her own wall. Her six paintings on view (and seven more at TREEHOUSE) date back to 2020 and range from small, imaginary portraits in acrylic on paper to large abstractions in oil on linen.
In Ekasala’s statement for her solo show at the BCA Center in Burlington in 2023 — the year she also won the Vermont Prize — she wrote, “Letting go and allowing intuition to take over is when the best work happens.”
“Reversing Tears” (54 by 58 inches) appears to be a case in point, an intuitive layering of suspended globular forms and swaths of energetic brushwork that gesture toward spatial depth but don’t actually define it. Color draws the eye here, from the dark oranges, browns and blacks of the right side to the luminous white bulb that dominates the upper-left center.
Ekasala was formerly a figurative painter, particularly during the 1990s when she lived in Paris. In many of her works at the Phoenix, she explores the threshold between representation and abstraction. “Air I Breathe” suggests a view of bulbous treetops against a divided sky of blue and yellow; “Key Hole,” in pinks, greens and a crown shape reminiscent of fairy tales, is composed around a small, old-fashioned keyhole shape backlit by an oval of yellow.
Most figurative are Ekasala’s portraits, such as “Mr. Bitterman,” a red, fist-waving, scowling figure in acrylic on 13-by-11-inch paper. Painted in 2023, it inevitably calls to mind a certain current U.S. president. “Boom,” meanwhile, appears to express emotion rather than a likeness, its explosion of jagged red lines substituting for a face in three-quarter profile. Whether that emotion is the surprise of sudden realization or something more sinister is indeterminate.
“Primordial Forms” rewards viewers by uniting three deep thinkers, artists who have persisted through years of experimentation and whose recent work is refreshingly idiosyncratic.
“Primordial Forms: Cynthia Kirkwood, Terry Ekasala, Grace DeGennaro,” on view through October 20 at the Phoenix in Waterbury.
The original print version of this article was headlined “True to Forms | Three abstract artists’ works resonate in Waterbury”
This article appears in Oct 1-7 2025.
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